March 4, 2011
If you find farts distasteful, stop reading now.
Um, let me rephrase that. If you find farts disgusting, crude, rude, nasty, stanky things… No, that’s not it either.
The third time is the charm: If it doesn’t bother you to read about farts and other earthy matters, keep reading. You see, the Catalans are fart masters. I’m not saying they issue more gas than anyone else, but I am saying that their vocabulary for talking about farts is more refined and descriptive than ours, similar to the way the Inuit have countless words to talk about snow. They perfectly capture the glorious taxonomy of farting with two words that encapsulate the two very different kinds of burps in the pants. Sorry? What is a burp in the pants, you ask? Well it’s what our parents told my sister, brother, and I that farts were called in our childhood because ‘fart’ was a bad word, until, that is, Mark, the older boy who lived across the street, burst out laughing when he heard us say ‘burp in the pants’ and quickly straightened us out. Humiliated by our naiveté yet secretly thrilled with the forbidden word, we quickly adopted ‘fart’.
Now, it’s not like English doesn’t have its own synonyms or euphemisms for farts, and especially for the act of farting: breaking wind, cutting the cheese, and tooting on the more colloquial side, along with the Southern-girl classic, “Who pooted?”, and flatulence on the more medical side. But the Catalans make an essential difference: the llufa versus the pet. Yes, pet. More on that below.
A llufa is what we call in English an SBD, silent-but-deadly. In English we need to cobble together three words to describe it, just the way we have to say ‘falling snow’ where the Inuits say qanik, and ‘snow on the ground’ where they say anijo. Circumlocutions don’t count – words, solitary, freestanding words, tell all about what matters to a society. A llufa is the stealthy, foul kind of fart, the kind that creeps up on you, engulfs you, and makes you cry out “WHO FARTED?!?!” The other kind of fart, the kind you hear, is called a pet in Catalan. Of course this leads to no end of mirth when Americans and Catalans find this out about each other’s lexis (“How many pets do you have?” “Oh, honey, an endless supply…”). A pet is a more innocent fart, the kind that you – I mean, someone else – “lets rip” but that causes no serious olfactory harm.
If a society has several words for the same phenomenon, it’s because that phenomenon weighs heavily in their collective consciousness. Catalans actually have somewhat of a scatological obsession, and I think farts would fit into that category. If you doubt me; if you think I am overgeneralizing or propagating negative stereotypes, I challenge you to go visit Catalonia at Christmastime. There, the Christmas markets are filled with caganers, usually male (although sometimes female) figurines that Catalans place in their beloved – and quite impressive and elaborate – nativity scenes at home, figurines with their pants down, squatting, with a thick, curly pile of turds under their butt. Uh huh, I kid you not. Look it up. You can almost see the steam…
The other scatological Christmas item is the cagatió, a wooden log with sticks attached as legs and a face drawn on one end. A traditional red barretina – a hat remarkably similar to Santa Claus’s, now that I think of it – is placed on the cagatió’s head and then, because we appreciate his need for privacy, his rear is covered with a blanket. The children then feed the cagatió (which, incidentally, means ‘Shit Log’), and of course, after eating, the guy’s gotta do his duty. So the kids beat the cagatió with a stick as they wait for him to put forth (the effluvium is presents for the kids, no less), singing:
Cagatió, avellanes i torrons,
Si no cagues bé
et daré un cop de bastó.
(or some variation thereof).
(Shit Log, hazelnuts and nougat,
If you don’t shit well,
I’ll hit you with my stick.)
I kid you not. Beat a log, he cacas and you get presents. But it gets better. How do you say two people are so close they're like peas in a pod? Well, in Catalan they say they're like "el cul i la merda", literally, "the butt and the shit". I mean, really: should we lock these people up?
So the Catalans’ interest in farts should come as no surprise. It took me a good 15 years to be enlightened on the fine distinction between llufes and pets, and I have Gemma to thank. One night when my daughter Cecilia invited her friend Gemma to spend the night – it must have been when they were eight or nine years old – we all crawled into Cecilia’s bed before going to sleep, all three of us, talking and giggling about God knows what, when suddenly Gemma uttered the magical words: “WHO FARTED?” In Catalan: “QUI HA TIRAT UNA LLUFA?” I stopped in my tracks. “A llufa?” I asked her. “What’s a llufa?” When she told me I asked her about the only word I had heard until then: “Isn’t that called a pet?” She then shared with me the insightful and oh-so-accurate distinction between llufa and pet. That kept us up giggling – and holding our noses – another half hour at least… and I’m not going to blow the cover of the guilty party, either!
Of course we Americans, some of us at least, truly do enjoy a good laugh over farts. Please tell me I’m not the only one who with girlfriends at sixth-grade sleepovers would empty a can of Pringles and proceed to… well, I’d better not continue in case my friends and I were weird beyond the pale. If you don’t know how that story ends, please, just drop it…
Ahem.
There are certain words in every language that are so perfect that I believe every other language should have them, words that utterly capture something: a feeling, a thought, a social act, or, in this case, a bodily function. Llufa and pet fit into this category in all their onomatopoeic perfection, and I know that even though we speak English in my home and left Catalonia over a year ago, llufa and pet are two borrowed words that, sorry to say, we utter all too often.
